The Big Perm

by Dawn Ryan

There’s a chance people could have guessed it had they given Big Perm more than a passing thought. The small hint was right there in his nickname; swap a single letter, one mound shaped M for one crevice filled V, and you’d have it. The Big Perm received his somewhat unique moniker for having been the only high school senior since the late seventies to have donned a full-fledged from-the-box perm. His frail locks rested like dried tomato leaves on his tomato shaped head, curly-cueing in tight, gelled ringlets along the border of his thin hairline. Had his townspeople been more skeptical and more fashion conscious The Big Perm’s big perm might have been some clue, perhaps a giveaway to a his deep-seeded psychological problem, his non-conventional sexual appetite. It was nothing short of porno hair, a heady advertisement for his crotch. Even after The Big Perm’s first sex crime, harmless as it was, the people of his town hardly worried for the safety of their young daughters. Big Perm was only sixteen and drunk or high and probably did it as a joke, but when he flashed his genitals to little Michelle and Eileen Caruso, four and six years his junior, they knew enough to run and tell the police. Big Perm had to go to court and was put on probation. For the next six years The Big Perm’s stepfather had to give free hair cuts and beauty supplies to the Caruso family to appease his own guilt and shame. Mr.Figgerelli owned a barbershop in the center of town where no one ever went but everyone assumed was a mafia front operation considering the Big Perm’s fancy cars and large house.

Yes, there were warning signs, but the Big Perm’s fellow citizens couldn’t be blamed for their blind-eyed ignorance. They were a simple, working class people, and proudly so, who were often caught up in the urban wrangling of the larger city close-by and who also had an abundance of more obviously strange types lingering around the streets and parks due to the half-way house for the mentally-ill located behind the public library, the school for the deaf and blind nestled between the mall and the old arsenal, and the various bus-stops peppered around town that worked as caravan for the homeless and drunk, and it had only been a couple years since that cat-breeder was found and arrested for having freezers filled with dead, deformed, inbred kittens. The town was used to the strange and uncanny occurring within the invisible walls of their four-square-miles, used to the maligned and disabled shouting jumbled expletives from across the street for their ill-fated and difficult existence. But despite these peripheral oddities, the town itself was normal and the sons and daughters it wrought were also normal. Big Perm, though his stepfather may or may not have kept books for the small and fading Boston mafia, was no exception. Big Perm’s minor lapse of judgment at the age of sixteen could have been overlooked so long as his name stayed out of the town paper and his one-eyed monster never peered its pirate eye at another little girl again.

This, it turned out, was too much to ask. The once mild mannered, lanky, tomato-headed, moderately oppressed seventeen year-old-turned-wild-eyed, beer-bellied basement dwelling, unemployed, twenty-seven year-old, Jimmy Figgerelli, affectionately known as Big Perm, would strike again. It took ten long years and happened with the aid of new technology and through LCD monitors, but Big Perm’s partner in crime did indeed show its ugly, purple, runny nose once more. Those who knew him or knew of him from high school took the news in passing humor. So Big Perm’s a big perv, they joked and nodded, thinking nothing of the man and girl behind the crime, thinking nothing of the ten years that sat between high school graduation and the day police cornered Big Perm with his hopeful girl-bride at the Super-Eight motel located less than a half mile away from where, just over ten years before, he had flashed the Caruso sisters. Time, for the normal, had moved effortlessly through the sub-shops, basketball hoops, and odd-jobs, whirled quickly or slowly depending on the difficulty of community college nursing classes or waxing and waning of construction work; froze or melted given the season, dragged with malaise and accelerated with spring, new romance or the birth of children. Time, for the normal, had brought with it every passing year new responsibilities, weight gains, wrinkles, financial burdens and relative wisdom that, for the majority of Big Perm’s peers, had culminated into adulthood. Time, however, had not plagued Big Perm with the same responsibilities, given his stepfather’s successful business, whatever it was, and Big Perm’s own lack of academic or business ambition and his inability to establish any longstanding or meaningful relationship with a woman.

To his credit, Big Perm had had his share of sexual encounters. Those sex acts he didn’t pay for or haggle from in-house strippers he’d managed to slyly procure from underage girls with low self-esteem and a proclivity for substance abuse, but despite Big Perm’s growing sexual repertoire it would appear that all he had gained from the passing of ten years was a stiffer more fastidious hard-on which demanded very specific stimulation. One might speculate that too much masturbation along with too much money and unlimited internet access had helped in turning the Big Perm into a perv. But it’s hard to tell with matters of the heart which is true and complicated romance between two equal footed lovers and which is the mere acting out of one pervert’s perversions onto a naïve, sexually curious, unsuspecting minor. One might sympathize so far as to question whether or not the culprit even knows the difference. However, The Big Perm was no Humbert Humbert, and little Natalie Crowley of Manchester, TN was no Lolita and their affair, which they never actually consummated in real time and space, was no great American love story. In fact, Big Perm was just an average pederast and his victim, a seemingly average teen run-away who would later be accused of developing much more quickly than the boys her age, accused of having tits and plump lips too early in life and accused, however subtlety by the Figgerelli family lawyer, of manipulating and seducing a fragile man.

Despite the streaming mpegs Natalie had saved to her hard drive of Big Perm whacking off to a webcam, blowing kisses and attempting to type ooooh uhhhh’s with his free hand, tightening his buttocks just as he came into his stroking hand; despite his presenting his semen to the camera eye like a gift, and congratulating his thirteen-year-old online IM buddy, look what you made me do baby; despite all this incriminating footage and despite the eye witness accounts of the full Cabbage Patch Doll audience, his childhood collection, perched on the wall right behind Big Perm, grinning their mongoloid grins in horror while their once faithful, adoptive father shamelessly pleasured himself in plain view, despite the recorded conspiracy to transport Natalie across state lines for very illicit purposes, Big Perm got another slap on the wrist: probation, a fine and official registration as a sex offender.

After all, Natalie wasn’t really that young. Though her breasts were more like the flabby fat deposits of a chunky little girl who hadn’t cared to starve away the excess, they were still breasts, and even though it was at the behest of Big Perm, Natalie did exhibit her breasts and genitalia to her own webcam, though briefly and accompanied by coquettish giggles that made her look more like a child sumo than a nymphet. Plus, the town wanted the story to go away quietly and painlessly. Natalie’s parents couldn’t believe it. She was a straight A student and sang in the church choir. They had no idea she was being lured by a pervert hundreds of miles away. How could they? Who expects such horrible things? Not even the school secretary, who allowed Big Perm to dismiss Natalie early without any verification that he was in fact her uncle. All Natalie had to do was vouch for him and five minutes later they were driving fast down lover’s lane. Big Perm was just minutes and inches away from finally committing that long awaited, much fantasized felony. Though they’d made one motel stop before reaching Big Perm’s hometown, they didn’t sleep together. They spooned and Jimmy dry humped her from behind, talking dirty and ejaculating harmlessly in his jeans. He was saving up the real stuff for the Super-Eight motel, where he felt safe to do what he pleased. The Big Perm just might have gotten away with it had Natalie remembered to delete her emails blue-printing their escape plan.

The story of Big Perm and Natalie Crowley is unarguably alarming and the effects of Natalie’s early sexualization can’t be measured until she reaches her own version of adulthood. In all likelihood Natalie’s adulthood will be marked by the sad milestones of her first eating disorder, first bout of depression, and first abusive relationship. The tale is as old as time: an older, unimpressive man discovers an advanced girl of above average intelligence and fucks every possibility of autonomy, self-worth, and naïve optimism for the future right out of her not-entirely-formed brain (in the name of love). Imagine the great female minds, capable of so much brilliance, being wasted on hating themselves and crash dieting. Imagine what the world could be if ridded of all the big pervs. The pandemic is so widespread, so pervasive that the chance for a cure seems impossible. But this isn’t a story about curing Big Perm of his sexual perversions, nor is it a story about inoculating little Natalie Crowley with the vaccine to adult depression. It merely starts there, in the Super-Eight motel, with Natalie and Jimmy being carted away; Natalie, tear streaked and heart-broken, and Jimmy, ghost-white and denying everything. What’s the use in a cautionary tale now that the damage is done? Lucky for our Natalie there are two stories of Big Perm to tell and this second story is a story about revenge and vigilantism.

This is a story about justice in its most Hebrew form, which began with the exposure of Big Perm as a sexual predator and rippled outward, exposing further the more damaging crimes that had taken place in Big Perm’s basement, well before little Natalie was even born. This second story involves Big Perm’s little sister, also coincidentally named Natalie, and the stretch of ten long years and the secret events of those years which set the Figgerelli family apart; years that made the father rich, the son a small-town Uday Hussein, and the daughter an anorexic, drug-addicted, lesbian performance artist living somewhere in Brooklyn. This is a story the universe tells when the Almighty puts the pieces back together, and though nothing about it feels good or right, not the beginning anyway and only the end in relation to its start, it is as life affirming as any other story of redemption about the weak vs. the strong.

Our Natalie had not been seen or heard from in ten years, when she was just fourteen. She’d runaway willingly with her nefarious older boyfriend, Jeremy, vowing never to return. At this time Mrs. Figgerelli, the mother to Big Perm and Natalie, was still alive, but her ovarian cancer was quickly ravaging her body. The authorities theorized Natalie had fled from grief of watching her mother die and Mr. Figgerelli agreed on this scenario. Everyone assumed she’d return eventually. Soon after Natalie left, Mrs. Figgerelli died from her cancer; it seemed to swallow her within months of her diagnosis. Mrs. Figgerelli’s was an ugly and painful death. It was sickening to watch unfold, sickening to the entire family, so all three, Natalie, Mr. Figgerelli and Jimmy ignored her for those last months of her life, discarding her in her bedroom, hardly caring enough to feed her. Natalie had been the only one to care for her mother at all up until she left, even though Natalie hated her mother. It was only a matter of time before she’d die once Natalie ran away. Mr. Figgerelli and Big Perm spent the majority of their spare time in the basement, denying the dying woman upstairs even
existed.

For a brief moment Natalie felt guilty for leaving her dying mother, but anger soon replaced the guilt, and justifiable so. Let the bitch die, Natalie told her twenty-five year old boyfriend, a perv in his own right and small town drug dealer with big city ambition, as she plopped into the bucket seat of his 1983 IROC Z on route to New York City. Mrs. Figgerelli knew all about the men in her life and knew all about the enterprise they’d built in Big Perm’s basement. She never went down there herself, not even to do laundry; she let her husband take care of that, but she knew, and Natalie knew she knew. She must have heard the shouts and grunts of men, Jimmy’s friends, Mr. Figgerelli claimed, as they engaged in orgy style sex-acts. She must have heard the occasional screaming protest of a young girl come to her senses, or at least questioned Mr. Figgerelli’s late night business deals with strange and hollowed out men who were teeming with enthusiasm from otherwise lifeless and vacant eyes. Had she been a wife who actually loved her husband and not his money she may have questioned his frequent trips to Southeast Asia and would have even asked to tag along. But Mrs. Figgerelli never did question her husband, not even when Natalie confided in her, telling her mother that her stepfather woke her in the middle of the night and made her do things while others watched, while some even videotaped and snapped pictures. Mrs. Figgerelli said Natalie was mistaken, so Natalie thought that first time she may have dreamt all of it, until the next time when she knew for certain it was real because she pinched herself and nothing happened. So, Let the bitch die, Natalie told her twenty-five year old boyfriend while she engaged in what she believed to be consensual oral sex two months before she disappeared for good.

Let that bitch die, Natalie wept to herself the day the news of her mother’s death reached her, via email, from one of her fourteen year old friends. By that time Mr. Figgerelli had expanded his secret business to the spare office of his barbershop, where no one ever went but where everyone in town assumed criminal dealings took place. Big Perm had become too conspicuous and Mr. Figgerelli knew it would only be a matter of time before his none-too-bright stepson did something stupid that would cause the police to come poking around. Mr. Figgerelli brought the more licentious pornography to the barbershop, but he still had a little dirty eye-candy tucked away in Jimmy’s bedroom. The pornography had become more of a hobby than lucrative business to Mr. Figgerelli, who had been making the big bucks organizing what he had advertised as Overseas Love Connections between wealthy, white men of the Northeast and the downcast youth of Indonesia and South America. These transactions were fairly airtight and Mr. Figgerelli never guaranteed any outright sale of child sex, not even after money exchanged hands. He depended on word of mouth and the staunch dedication of a pervert in heat to do and pay just about anything for what he wanted. Still, Mr. Figgerelli took few chances and the day Big Perm’s mug shot appeared on the local news he loaded up his minivan with boxes and bags of stuff and headed to the dump. The neighbors assumed he was throwing out his deadbeat son once and for all, and they didn’t blame him. This must have been the final straw for a man who had experienced so much hardship, loss and frustration in ten short years, starting with Jimmy’s first embarrassing offense. The neighbors couldn’t bring themselves to judge the Figgerelli family beyond the visible facts, or otherwise they’d have had to form their own share of dirty thoughts. So once again, Mr. Figgerelli managed to cover his tracks and protect his image from the damage done by his smutty stepson. It was only by chance that his estranged stepdaughter caught a glimpse of Big Perm’s arrest photo on the television and, like the flick of a switch, sadness and rage ensued.

Natalie had been working on a performance piece with her lover around the time Big Perm was arrested. The two women were touring New York and small art houses in parts of Vermont and Maine. While the couple performed in Bangor, their agent managed to schedule a last minute stop in Massachusetts before they returned to the city. At first Natalie refused, but her lover, who dubbed herself Natalia to sound French and to showcase the narcissistic qualities of their homosexuality, demanded they perform at as many cities as possible before their show became démodé. That was Natalia’s term, démodé, but Natalie didn’t know what it meant. Natalia had attended RISDE, read a lot of books and came from wealth and privilege and therefore made all of the decisions for both women. Natalie accepted her role as the raw one, the one who developed art from the pit of her stomach, without the imposition of art history resting in the armchair of her unconscious, resurrecting, imitating the greats. This, too, was Natalia’s assessment. Natalie was not the one who made decisions, and this was fine with Natalie so long as Natalia didn’t make her hook the way her boyfriends had. There was the first one, Jeremy, the boyfriend who had freed her from her previous life and had promised a good, clean, fresh start. She was only fourteen and trusted him because he was older and they’d been together for a few months, but soon after arriving into the city their car was stolen, his drug connections went through and his last bright idea was to peddle his young girlfriend.

“We’ll just go to Chinatown baby, just one time so we can make a little money so we can start something up right. We just need a few hundred and we’re in.” He told her, “That’s just a few times, babes.”

She listened, reluctantly.

“Anyways, you’d done worse, babes, for your father and he didn’t even pay you.” However insensitive, he was right. She stripped down to a halter top and a pair of cut-off jean shorts and tried her damnedest to look slutty. Her stepdad had only taught her children’s poses.

Natalie knew right away that Jeremy didn’t know what he was doing. At first he stood around nervously, like a boy at a lemonade stand waiting for some schmuck to take pity on him. After a few unsuccessful bids, he tried hawking her like a used car. It took a whole night canvassing the street corners and catcalling for Natalie to finally find a John. She found him outside a convenience store, while Jeremy was inside purchasing a bag of red pistachios. When Jeremy came out, sucking on his blood red fingertips, Natalie was gone. He waited a little under an hour for her to return; when she didn’t, he left, thinking the worst of her fate. Jeremy stole a few purses on the train and bought himself a bus ticket back home, where he dodged questions about the missing IROC Z and denied knowing anything about Natalie Figgerelli’s whereabouts.

Natalie had been sort of lucky that night. Her John turned out not to be a John at all. The man who approached her had been watching Natalie and her haphazard pimp clumsily trying to make sales. When Jeremy went to the store, the man made his move towards Natalie and offered her a deal. The man, coincidently, was a pimp with a whole army of ho’s and Natalie felt safe as part of his legion. Like most pimps, he was violent and cruel, but he offered job security where no one else did, and she stayed with him for quite a few years, perfecting her trade and developing a coke habit. Detailing these years would be gratuitous.

It was through prostitution that Natalie met Natalia. Natalia, who at this time went by the name Turquoise because she was fucking a Buddhist, began to feel like a charlatan for using models in her paintings instead of prostitutes, like the great French painters had. It was a dying tradition and its potential extinction saddened Turquoise to the point of mobilization. Being a woman, she didn’t possess the nose to sniff out those sorts of rackets, so she asked her then Buddhist boyfriend to find her a prostitute. He brought home Natalie five hours later. She was nineteen and thin as a rail from cocaine and a job that required a lot of cardio. Turquoise was just as thin because of her veganism. The Buddhist had purchased Natalie and an eightball for three hundred dollars.

Turquoise was blown away. She snorted a fat line and in her best impersonation of an inspired and manic artist, she sketched furiously on her newsprint. Turquoise wasn’t as talented as she thought she was and her sketches were more in the vain of graphic design compositions: tits asymmetric to the ass, the V of the vagina in harmony with the apple of the chin and so on, until most of the drawings resembled thumbnails for a cigarette add, but before long Turquoise’s pad of newsprint was discarded all together and with the obvious juxtaposition of two complimentary shapes forming the visual poetry of commodity, Natalie’s nipple found its way into the Buddhist’s mouth. All other shapes assembled accordingly. Turquoise masturbated on the futon while directing the Buddhist where to suck and rub.

What happened next might have been caused by the cocaine or maybe it was mere confusion, given the setting and the players or perhaps it was just one of those cosmic glitches which seem to scramble feelings and thinking, but right as the Buddhist’s penis entered Natalie from behind, the two females found themselves in a love-locked gaze, and, as if by telepathy, they agreed to marry each other right then and there. They were enchanted with each other, gazing intently into the other’s eyes until Turquoise defiantly eliminated the middleman, shoved the Buddhist aside and lunged face-first into Natalie’s sopping wet muff.

That was the end of Turquoise and the birth of Natalia. “You’re staying with me baby,” Natalia whispered as she combed the small hairs along Natalie’s nape. “I’ll take care of you.”

The Buddhist seemed to evaporate completely, or maybe he just snuck out the back window. Natalie lie silent, accepting Natalia’s affirmation like she always had with the men in her life. Natalia, however, was tender, slender and close to Natalie in age. This kept her from fully dominating Natalie in the way the others had. Natalia had fallen in love with Natalie and even though she inadvertently exploited her lover, she would never leave her on the wayside. Their union, along with Natalie’s sordid past, provided Natalia a muse and the edge her art had been lacking. Natalie gave up prostitution and Natalia gave up painting and dedicated herself and her lover fully to wacky and pornographic street performances of which Natalie didn’t quite understand but proved to be much more natural and talented at than her counterpart. Things were good. The only major deformity to their love affair was their need to be intoxicated or altered, however slightly, in order to feel any intensity for each other. For this reason, the artists were forever high, drunk, tipsy, over-caffeinated, or hopped-up on over-the-counter meds or whatever else they could swallow, snort or inhale just to reach the dimension where their marriage felt legitimate and comfortable. Otherwise they were fucking or working separately on their art pieces.

The performance that had finally given the lovers some recognition was inspired by the Marilyn Chamber’s vehicle, Behind the Green Door, an adult film about a young woman abducted and ravaged by various men, women, and races. In Natalia’s production Natalie is hanged from the ceiling with trapeze equipment and audience members are queued to have their way with her. Arranged on a folding card table beside the trapeze equipment is an assortment of seemingly useless, sexless, and random inanimate objects such as tennis shoes, Christmas ornaments, canned fruits, used coffee grounds, inflated birthday balloons, chew, the Book of Latter Day Saints, a ship in a bottle and a box of cow steroids. These objects are made available for the more pervish and/or theatrical audience members for whatever freewheeling, physical act they can conjure. In order to maintain the authenticity of the performance, Natalie wears a female condom and doesn’t require the participants to wear protection. The great majority of attendees find creative and elaborate ways to avoid intercourse, while some of the more daring men and women poke, prod, suckle and pinch poor Natalie, who despite whatever act is being performed on her, fakes ecstasy. The last bit of the performance, Natalia arrives in blackface, top-hat, centaur legs and strap-on and sodomizes Natalie to the trumpeting of Taps. This performance piece was revered by the New York art elite and it would have been known in LA circles too, if Natalie had allowed the piece to be videotaped. It was the one decision she had made and stuck to since the relationship began. No videotapes. Too many bad memories.

The show the two women gave in Massachusetts proved to be the most elaborate. It took place inside an abandoned factory-turned spindle museum of an old mill town. The enormous machinery, rafters, and period dressed mill-girl mannequins gave new social satire to the work, but it also caused a more violent, sexual reaction in some of the male attendees. Natalia would later posit in an art essay that the nineteenth century industrial setting had inspired a true capitalistic need to fuck harder and better than the guy before. Natalie had nothing to say about it accept to recommend they start providing KY jelly between participants.

After the Massachusetts show, the two women checked into a quaint, little bed and breakfast. Proud and elated with a job well done, they had a good go at each other while the eleven o’clock news jabbered idly in the background. The two women were in sixty-nine position, with Natalie uncomfortably splayed on top. Being on top of Natalia’s face was a difficult spot and Natalie could never get off. She slobbered between Natalia’s legs listlessly, waiting until it was time to spoon and go to bed, when suddenly, raising her head to take a breath, Natalie spotted a familiar face on the TV screen.

“Holy shit,” she blurted.

“Sorry sweety,” Natalia replied, thinking she’d queefed or pissed accidentally.

“No, hon.” Natalie said. “I think…I think I saw my brother on the news just now.”

“You have a brother?” Natalia muttered, mouth full.

Natalie gently removed herself from Natalia’s body and headed for the TV. She raised the volume and listened to the whole sordid tale.

“What a big fucking perv,” she said to herself. She couldn’t help but laugh, it had been ten years, but Jimmy still sported those strange and oily curls. And the fact that the little girl’s name was Natalie! How could they still be doing this to us, she thought to herself, after all these years, still fucking us?

“About fucking time.” Natalie sat up on the bed, lit a cigarette, drank some Schlitts, snorted a bump from her pinky finger and said, “I wanna go home.”

“We’ll leave in the morning,” Natalia replied.

“No honey, not our home,” Natalie corrected. “I wanna go to my home. I mean where I’m from.” Natalie uncomfortably tried to define that place from whence she came, that seedy little pit, that slimy urethra of a town. “I wanna show you something, this really fucked up place. I wanna show you my brother’s basement.”

Natalie had never confided in Natalia many details of her childhood; only vague admissions to abuse, neglect and unhappiness, but never the full story, and Natalia never pried, mostly because she assumed, since they had such a cosmic and intense connection, that she knew all she needed to know. Going to Natalie’s home would be like the obvious gravity of centripetal force, the journey to the center of her lover and therefore herself.

Natalia, always up for something exciting and different, suggested they leave right then and there, in the veil of night. They were only an hour away and because of the drugs and their adrenalin levels from the show, they weren’t about to fall asleep. They jumped into Natalia’s cerulean blue Chevy Nova and headed for Natalie’s hometown. It had been a long while since Natalie had been home. She was only fourteen when she’d left and hadn’t learned how to drive. She still didn’t know how to drive and only had a faint sense of direction. For this reason it took the girls three hours to finally reach town. It was two-thirty in the morning and Christmastime; the trees in the town square were trimmed with lights, and attached to the lampposts were oversized wreaths heralding the faithful, disseminating good cheer. The streets were vacant except for the Nova and the bright hallows of lamplight blotting snowdrifts and sidewalks with yellow light. The town was silent with peace and inactivity, but there was still a heavy feeling, like right before a snowfall when the sky is just about to give way, except that the sky was clear and there was no chance of snow. It was the heavy feeling Natalie had always felt at home, a feeling that kept her cautious as a child but, as a twenty-four year old woman, now made her feel a deep and primal anticipation. Something was going to happen tonight.

Natalia pulled over and parked the car. “Where do I go, Baby?” She asked.

Natalie didn’t respond. Without meaning to, Natalia had parked directly in front of Mr. Figgerelli’s barbershop. Natalie was motionless, mesmerized by the glass windows, green and white striped awning and the red bricks that made up that building; she stared, waiting to be hypnotized by the barber post which no longer swirled its blue and red spirals but had swirled when she was a child. For whatever reason, Natalie had always associated the post with a dentist’s office and his various drills and picks, but now it all looked so harmless and normal, almost a serene image harkening back to the good old days.

“How fucking Americana.” Natalia blurted, unknowing. “Let’s take a picture in front of it.”

Natalie was horrified and suddenly shaking. The association of photography with her stepfather sent a tremble across her body. She took another bump of cocaine, offered a bump to Natalia, stared deeply into her lover’s eyes and, as if revealing the entire, horrible explanation for whom and what she was, she said, “That’s my stepfather’s barbershop.”

The syllables of stepfather flickered off Natalie’s lips like three, stiff cuss words, and suddenly the whole thing made sense, the whole damned universe, and Natalia’s mind, with its jet sailing synapses, pieced the meaning together. A stepfather is very rarely a good thing; something truly awful must have happened in this town, to Natalie, to the girl she loved. Then, like two twins who compensate for each others’ weaknesses, Natalia began exhibiting the signs of rage that Natalie was unable to exhibit herself.

“Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!” Natalia shouted, bashing the steering wheel with the base of her palms. “What the fuck?!” Natalia fumed, glaring at the barbershop, mouth agape with disbelief. The cocaine had intensified her naturally erratic behavior, but now she had a cause for her aggression, a spout for her steam.

“What did they do to you, Baby?” Natalia finally managed, but by this time Natalie was in tears, unable to respond. Natalia held Natalie close and let her cry. They sat for another fifteen minutes, crying and holding each other, waiting for the sign, the trigger, the bolt of lightning that would tell them when to act next. Natalia was the first to notice when the flash of light came. It was the flick of the switch by the backdoor of the barbershop. Somebody had turned on the office light, that somebody presumably being Mr. Figgerelli, the culprit himself. He had always done his business dealings late in the night or in the early morning.

Natalia nudged Natalie’s shoulders, “Sit up, Honey. Sit up.”

They could see inside the barbershop now, with its vintage, red barber chairs, torn and unused, and Natalie could also see the frail and aged visage of her stepfather, a sight she didn’t quite recognize right away. It wasn’t until she saw him take a few steps did she know for certain that it was him. His gangly swagger was unmistakable, but things about him had changed. He had become fashionably brazen, not like before, when Natalie was around and he dressed and looked like an accountant. He had a perm, though there was a good chance the hair was a toupee, and he wore a red, skintight muscle shirt over his concave abdomen. Given the weather and his age, Natalia deduced by his shirt alone that Mr. Figgerelli was a crazy and dangerous sex perv, and though she didn’t know exactly how crazy and dangerous, she knew she had do something about it, in the name of love and in the tradition of performance art. Mr. Figgerelli’s dress and appearance was fagoty and cartoonish, and to the average set of eyeballs he would have been dismissed as an eccentric or even considered intriguing for his uniqueness and unabashed Peter Pan complex, but the Natalies knew better.

The women took one last look at each other, one final, deep peek into the other’s soul to answer whatever doubts might have been left about their love and commitment. There were none.

“Grab the camera, Babe.” Natalia said.

“What are you gonna do?” Natalie asked.

“We’re going inside.”

And just like that, the women set out for the happening of their life, and Natalia knew it. She headed across the street and towards the barbershop determined, justified and conterminous to her weary-eyed, slouching, camera-toting lover. Somebody, maybe one of Mr. Figgerelli’s few hair-clients, had taped a flier onto the glass of the door advertising a high school theatre production of How to Succeed at Business Without Really Trying. Natalia laughed, tore the little graphic of the smiling and frowning drama masks from the top of the paper, placed it in her pocket, and queued Natalie to snap a photo of the remaining flier. It was obvious to Natalia that this was a stage and the theater flier was a cosmic gesture, a symbol that acquitted her of all misdeeds that would follow. Natalie raised her camera and snapped. The camera’s flash went off and the light it shined seemed profoundly bright, bright enough to catch Mr. Figgerelli’s attention.

“Oh shit,” Natalie said, ducking to the side of the door. She was suddenly frightened of being caught, but Natalia wasn’t. She watched, unmoved, as Mr. Figgerelli shuffled from his office to the front entrance of the barbershop; she stood smirking as he squinted, trying to make out the figure at the door. He crouched forward, shaded his eyes with his hand, as if the sun was beating down, but he couldn’t recognize who was at the door. It was clearly a woman, and therefore not a client, and then he noticed that she was grinning and sort of young looking, and probably not a threat; maybe she was lost or from the deaf school and needed a little help or maybe she wanted something different all together. He’d met young girls online and at certain parties who’d put their hands on a stranger like they hadn’t any control over themselves. It was unlikely, but worth checking out.

Natalia was breathing heavy, huffing steam in white puffs as the perv came closer. He turned the deadbolt with his long, gray fingers, and stared curiously at the young female staring back at him with such honesty, such knowing that he’d felt he’d must have seen her before. He was perfect to Natalia too; his dress, his toupee, his sinewy flesh. He was a real piece of work and if she could nail him to a wall and display him as her own she would, but she couldn’t. Undeterred, she’d try the next best thing, and like a good little twin, Natalie knew enough to snap a photo the second Mr. Figgerelli, her once adoptive and at rare moments loving father, opened the door, which ultimately opened the portal to a world of offbeat justice and marvelous spectacle. It was, coincidently and despite the two large, glass panes, a green door and what happened behind it remains mostly rumor and speculation, though photographic evidence confirms certain details. Mr. Figgerelli was beaten beyond recognition by his whaling and infuriated potential daughter-in-law. Natalie chronicled the pell-mell with her digital camcorder. It was painful for Natalie to watch; after all he was the only father she’d ever known, but Natalia was right, he needed a beating and she did indeed hate him.

Natalia would argue in one of her essays, with limited sagacity, that the truth is not nearly as important as the perceived truth and thus made it a dictum for this particular art piece never to articulate the anatomy of The Big Perm, as the installation was unofficially dubbed. She let the art speak for itself. Some conservative critics reviled the work, calling it snuff and repulsive. Other, more open-minded critics raved the piece; one most notable critic referred to the installation as ‘the first truly gestalt, well-rounded, avant-garde installation to ever make front page press; in fact, the only avant-garde installation to reach the fore of mainstream media.’ The critic, of course, was alluding to the coverage of Mr. Figgerelli’s arrest two long months after The Big Perm made its debut. Authorities couldn’t quite catch him committing lewd and lascivious acts against children, a crime he’d become adapt at concealing; however, through good police work, thorough investigation and Mr. Figgerelli’s less than accurate accounting practices, they managed to charge our villain with tax evasion, a crime he’d been committing as long as his Overseas Love Connections business had existed. CourtTV even covered the trial and produced an Investigators episode based in the Figgerelli family. The blurred lines that separated Art/Life and/Entertainment gave theorists much to mull over.

When The Big Perm first showed in New York, many spectators believed the contents of the work to be fiction. They couldn’t imagine such a man as Mr. Figgerelli, with his lopsided hair of curls adhered to his bloody head, his lanky figure, and his soft voice, could truly exist in a world, in a town and have committed the acts which, after hours of odd torture, he confessed to in the video. He was like a sad clown and belonged in a circus, on display somewhere, not in a community with women and children around. He belonged in The Big Perm, however unbelievable; he was safer there more than anywhere else. The Big Perm had made what had happened to Natalie incredible, fictitious and that was good for us. The karate chops and crane stance that Natalia had learned as a child in her privileged, alternative art and performance high school and had used to beat, vanquish, reduce and humiliate Mr. Figgerelli seemed too choreographed and too silly to have actually produced the physical results that they did. Even Natalia’s Hi-Ya!’s and Mr. Figgerelli’s pleas for mercy seemed scripted, rehearsed. Their awkward, uncomfortable glances toward the camera-eye had the essence of low-budget porn. But the blood was real, and the jail time that all three performers faced was real. The Big Perm was censored and later pulled all together, but not before it had achieved cult status. The Natalies got off light from their assault charges, with just a few months in the joint, probation and community service. Mr. Figgerelli would have gotten off light too, considering his superb legal team; however news of his past indiscretions made its way to the prison yard, where he was shanked by a lifer and left by prison guards to bleed to death.

And like the turning of the all powerful tide, our little Natalie, once left to fuck to death on the cold streets of New York, found her self nestled safely in the arms of her better half, living comfortably in a Park Slope townhouse. The success of The Big Perm earned Natalia artistic credibility and, when coupled with an MFA from Columbia, a job as associate professor at The New School.

But what of our first offender? The only character left seemingly unscathed by the release of the performance piece was the original Big Perm, who, after his stepfather’s death, inherited what was left of Mr. Figgerelli’s estate, once fines, legal fees and debt had been subtracted. But, being a dull-wit, Jimmy Figgerelli pissed through most of his money and would have lost the house all on his own had the high school football team not set it to flames, vigilante style, after a division victory. Like a good mob, they all vouched for the other’s whereabouts and the arsonists went un-indicted. It would only be a matter of ten short years before The Big Perm found his way within the ranks of the local homeless, drifting from bus stop to train pit, drinking yellow Listerine for a buzz, and his thinning hair shedding like the wilted leaves atop a piece of fruit.

The universe had amended its story of the Figgerellis, though it waited until most of the damage had been done and well past the point where Natalie’s psyche could be repaired, but despite (or with the aid) of drug and alcohol abuse, the two women lived happier ever after. At certain times, this is all we can ask for. So let us hope, dear patient and forgiving audience, that the lesson of Big Perm is heeded; that we encourage the revelation of secrets, even the darkest of secrets, and accept their exposure as a necessary act that forever leads us to a new and just order. Society might never feel your pain, Natalies, but we’ll relish in the sensationalism.

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Dawn Ryan is a resident of Lowell, MA.

The Big Perm
© 2006 by Dawn Ryan